100 years in the past this month, the primary fuel chamber execution was carried out in the United States. On February 8, 1924, the state of Nevada used cyanide gas to put Gee Jon to death.
In a merciless twist of historical past, in January of this 12 months the state of Alabama revived the usage of fuel when it put Kenneth Smith to death. Over the course of the hundred years that separated Jon’s and Smith’s executions, the historical past of the fuel chamber, as I famous in Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, has been marked by claims that it could present a painless loss of life and an extended sequence of failures to dwell as much as that promise.
Like each different technique of execution used on this nation, execution by deadly fuel has not been protected, dependable, or humane.
The highway to the primary use of the fuel chamber began on August 28, 1921, at eight within the morning, when Tom Quong Kee was discovered lifeless from a single gunshot. Two days earlier Jon and Hughie Sing had traveled to the small city the place Kee lived.
Quickly after Kee’s loss of life, the native sheriff obtained a tip about two strangers who had been seen strolling across the city. The tip recognized Jon and Sing as members of a Chinese language gang who had been despatched to hold out successful on Kee.
Sing confessed and implicated Jon. Later they have been each sentenced to loss of life below Nevada’s death penalty law that approved deadly fuel because the state’s technique of execution.
That regulation, known at the time it was adopted as the Humane Execution Bill, handed the state meeting virtually unanimously earlier than being despatched on to the state senate the place it was accredited the exact same day. Nevada’s governor, Emmet Boyle, a longtime opponent of capital punishment, nonetheless signed the invoice into regulation.
The invoice that Boyle signed originally called for executions to take place while the condemned slept in their cell. Loss of life row inmates could be housed in hermetic, leakproof cells, separate from different prisoners. On the day of the execution, valves could be open that may fill the cell with fuel, killing the sleeping prisoner painlessly.
The thought of utilizing fuel to execute prisoners can be traced back to 1791 when one of many commanders in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army stuffed a ship filled with insurgent slaves with sulfur dioxide fuel, killing all of them. Within the late 19th century, legislators and activists disillusioned with hanging as a technique of execution started to think about whether or not fuel could be a greater various.
For instance, members of the Pennsylvania medical society advisable that the state undertake carbonic acid to be used in its executions. Dr. J. Chris Lange said that in an execution by deadly fuel, “loss of life will occur in from 3 to eight minutes after the fuel ascends to a degree with the mouth and nostril of the prisoner.”
He claimed that it could result in loss of life “with out preliminaries” and “with out the potential for accidents” and would “depart the prison little extra to dread of the long run within the widespread lot of all mankind.”
Whereas Pennsylvania didn’t find yourself adopting the fuel chamber, curiosity on this technique grew within the late 1800s and the primary twenty years of the 1900s. It was spurred on by the expertise of World Warfare I, wherein deadly fuel was a brand new and cutting-edge weapon.
By the point Nevada obtained round to executing Gee Jon, it had deserted the thought of gassing an inmate in his cell. As an alternative, a concrete constructing within the jail yard, beforehand the jail barbershop, was transformed into the nation’s first fuel chamber.
As a report from the Loss of life Penalty Data Middle says, “The fuel chamber, which was constructed by prisoners, was first examined on two kittens, who died inside 15 seconds of the fuel launch.’
On the day of his execution, Jon was put to loss of life by hydrocyanic acid. However his execution didn’t go easily.
Hydrocyanic acid only becomes gaseous and deadly at approximately 79°F. Nevada’s plan was to pump the fuel, which had been dropped at the jail in its extra steady liquid type, into the chamber the place a heating gadget was left to heat the liquid because it entered the chamber.
Sadly, the morning of February 8, 1924 was cold, and the heater inside the chamber malfunctioned. The fuel spilled into the chamber in each liquid and gaseous type, pooling on the ground and spreading by the air.
A number of minutes into the execution, Jon was nonetheless respiratory. His head rolled again and fell ahead a variety of occasions earlier than he finally succumbed.
Afterward, as The Washington Submit notes, “No post-mortem was carried out out of worry that fuel in Gee’s physique would poison onlookers.”
Nonetheless, state officers insisted that the execution “was successful.” A headline in The Nevada State Journal read, “Nevada’s novel loss of life regulation is upheld by the very best courtroom — humanity.”
Over the course of the subsequent few many years, different states adopted Nevada’s instance and adopted the fuel chamber. Arizona grew to become the primary state to take action when it replaced hanging with this new technology of death, and Colorado quickly did the identical.
In 1935, North Carolina and Wyoming constructed their very own fuel chambers. Two years later, California, Missouri, and Oregon adopted swimsuit. In the course of the Nineteen Fifties, Mississippi, Maryland, and New Mexico all carried out executions by deadly fuel.
In its 100-year historical past, probably the most well-known fuel chamber execution occurred in California in 1960 when Caryl Chessman was killed at San Quentin State Jail. Chessman had been sentenced to loss of life for a sequence of crimes he dedicated in January 1948 within the Los Angeles space.
Whereas in jail, he wrote 4 books, together with his memoirs Cell 2455, Loss of life Row, which was made right into a film in 1955.
“From Oregon to North Carolina,” The Washington Submit observes, “prisons developed distinctive protocols corresponding to coating a fuel chamber doorway with Vaseline to maintain the fuel in and patting down an inmate’s hair and garments after executions to get the fuel out so nobody obtained sick whereas dealing with the physique. Some prisoners have been shaved and stripped to their underwear to decrease the danger.”
However regardless of these efforts, deadly fuel, which has been used greater than 600 occasions over its 100-year historical past, has not lived as much as its billing as a humane execution technique. In actual fact, more than 5% of executions by gas have been botched, making it the second most problematic execution technique after deadly injection, which has a botch fee of 8%.
Whereas the U.S. Supreme Courtroom has by no means dominated on the constitutionality of deadly fuel, in 1996 a federal appeals courtroom unanimously held that California’s statute authorizing deadly fuel violated the Eighth Modification. Because the courtroom stated, “The district courtroom’s findings of maximum ache, the size of time this excessive ache lasts, and the substantial danger that inmates will endure this excessive ache for a number of minutes require the conclusion that execution by deadly fuel is merciless and weird.”
We learned that lesson all over again earlier this 12 months throughout Alabama’s botched execution of Kenneth Smith.
In actual fact, regardless of the explicit form of fuel that has been used, as regulation professor Deborah Denno notes, “Each fuel execution concerned torture of some kind…. The inmate is acutely aware and conscious of what’s happening, and the torment is apparent.” As its 100-year historical past exhibits, loss of life by deadly fuel, as Denno rightly concludes, is “the worst technique of execution we’ve ever had and probably the most merciless.”
